


Mummy's Mask: The Half-Dead City

by Isada



Series: Dungeons and Witchers [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Pathfinder (Roleplaying Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22125121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isada/pseuds/Isada
Summary: A new member of the witcher's guild adventures in the D&D/Pathfinder setting of Osirion
Series: Dungeons and Witchers [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592569
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Mummy's Mask: The Half-Dead City

Sand blew from the peaks of the dunes shining golden beneath the scorching sun. On a sandstone shelf where the Asp and Crook converged to form the River Sphinx, the half-city of Wati was full to bursting with life for the first time in a thousand years. 

Feckless profiteers from every corner of the Inner Sea had assembled in the living half of the ancient city to await the official opening of the walled off, walled up half of the dead. There was a palpable festivity in the air, a monetary bloodthirst. Once empty streets were choked full of vendors hawking goods and refreshments. The most opportunistic of them advertised the rates at which they’d buy any treasures and antiquities plundered from the grounds.

Nefre lifted the bottom end of their mask, revealing a scarred sliver of brown face. They spat at the foot of one such bloodsucking hawker, forcing them to recoil. Old gods take them all.

Kicker, their donkey, nickered in agreement.

The short, stocky Wati native allowed themself the half crook of a smile as they returned their mask to position. As unlikely as it might be, the donkey-shaped helm was a symbol of ancient faith. And respect, which the Pharasmin priests frittering about beneath the largest awning the market district sorely, sorely lacked.

The blue awning stitched with Pharasma’s white spiral had been drawn between the two entry pillars of the Grand-fucking-Mausoleum. Below, two urns sat atop a table on the wooden stage constructed for the tomb-raiding lottery.

Supposedly, the random draw would eliminate conflict between the various factions gathering by the stage. But when had looters bowed to any law but fight or flight? Most of them didn’t even shut up when the high priestess finally walked onstage to begin the lottery they’d all been itching for. She had to call for silence, her magic-amplified voice booming irately overtop of the bazaar.

“THANK you. Now, kindly bear in mind that the necropolis, though originally sanctified to Osirion’s ancient deities, has been ordained as a holy site to the Lady of the Graves. Therefore, let these rules guide you as we reclaim Wati’s lost artifacts for the betterment of all:

“Remember how this came to pass. Every slave’s hut is a memorial. Honor the departed. May you go with the Lady’s blessing.”

With those few guidelines, undoubtedly forgotten as soon as they were uttered, the high priestess nodded at two of the acolytes. Each drew a wooden token from either of the urns.

The first identified the group, matching the token received when it registered for the lottery. The second determined the section of necropolis assigned to said group. The matching token was then presented to the priests, who doled out the map to the site in relation to the gate through which it needed to pass.

Nefre, holding Kicker’s lead at the back of the looting crowd, muttered a mantra-like prayer under their breath. “Neith, Ptah, Horus, Sobek, Anubis, Maat, Khepri, Sekhmet, Ra, Bes, Set, Nephthys, Bastet. Neith, Ptah, Horus--”

N13 was drawn at the stage. Nefre gave Kicker a rub and a pat.

“Watch my back, old girl.”

They elbowed their way through the crowd in a beeline to the stage, stepping on as many toes as were presented. The priest holding the token frowned disapprovingly. The look glanced as harmlessly as the sunlight off Nefre’s mask.

“Group of ‘Jackass and Kicker,’ I presume?” said the Pharasmin, his mouth twisting in distaste.

They flashed their matching token and answered with a flippant “yeah” in further affront on this rival cleric.

He rolled his eyes and passed Nefre a small mapscroll wax-sealed with both the Pharasmin spiral and the official sun and bird-winged scarab of Ruby Prince Khemet III. They broke it open right under his nose.

“Fuck.” The random manor they’d received was absolutely not the sanctum which their animal-headed deities had shown them. “Can I get a redraw?”

“No, ‘Jackass.’”

Yeah, no, they probably deserved that. They left the stage, considering their options as they trampled feet back toward Kicker. 

The loot-‘n’-lottery went all month, but groups were limited to one drawing per day. Which meant Nefre could either head back to the guildhouse and wait around for a bounty, or they could get a taste of the monsters that’d taken up in the half of the city left out to dry for a thousand years in the wake of the Plague of Madness.

Recon. That wouldn’t make a dent in the massive debt they’d accrued for simply joining the witchers, but it was clearly the more life-ensuring of their options.

Nefre sighed. The old gods had waited millenia to return to prominence in their own homeland. They were apparently content to extend their return a day or so.

They took Kicker’s lead. “Alright, old girl. Time to go put some spitshine on the witcher name.”

\--/--

Sandstone walls ten feet high enclosed the manor estate. The second story of a stone mansion peeked overtop and adjoined the rear wall. A pair of statues flanked the tarnished bronze gate, their weapons as pointless as partially opened doors. Though stripped of paint, the hieroglyphs carved to the left of the gate were still legible. To those who’d studied Ancient Osiriani.

Nefre squinted through their ass-headed eyeholes. “House of Pentheru.” Completely meaningless.

They jerked their masked chin back at Kicker. “Watch my back, old girl.”

The donkey gave a stolid hee-haw. Nefre strode through the doors into the sands of Pentheru’s courtyard.

Columns once brightly painted and now bleached beneath the sun supported stone archways to opposite sides of the manor. Each of their tarnished doors hung similarly ajar. Straight ahead, stone steps ascended to the ornate doors of the mansion.

Better to poke around the grounds first. Scope out exits from the house and such.

Thus, they found themself in the courtyard’s courtyard, a spacious square of sand-buried garden surrounded by a tiled walkway. At its center stood the statue of a wealthy, bejewelled woman made entirely out of sand.

Nefre’s hand hovered over the hilt of their khopesh. That statue was as suspicious as it was unnatural.

It didn’t move.

They held off on the khopesh and went for their sling and stones instead. The witcher held a stone up under their masked mouth and muttered an invocation, “Bes.”

A faint gray light limned the rock. Keeping their distance, Nefre sent the empowered stone spinning from the sling.

And smashing through the shifting sand of the statue’s face as the sandman’s features melted away into a tentacled, medusa-like horror. Its jaws widened in a soundless roar with to an enormous maw full of fangs as large as its head.

As the witcher shrugged off its aura of sleep, the sandman dove into the surrounding sand, vanishing in a poof of grit. Nefre drew their khopesh, readying for its inevitable--

The sandman’s tentacles lashed seamlessly up from the sand, bashing the witcher in the buckler.

But Nefre was ready. Chanting the names of their gods in a mantra of war, they spun with the blow and slashed their gray-blazing khopesh at the...sand. 

“--Maat, Khepri, fuck!” 

Yeah, no, the blade barely put a chip in the elemental of malleable earth. The tentacles melted back into the sand.

Nefre shifted back to the farside of the floor tile and grabbed a stone in their other hand.

The heaped sand advanced onto the walkway, tentacles surging up to whale on the witcher’s blade and buckler with bone-jarring clangs.

Nefre, desperate for distance, threw caution to the wind and made a wild break for the outer courtyard, the sandman bludgeoning their unprotected calves. Gods’ glyphs, that was gonna hurt in the morning.

But by the dusty bastards, they’d done it. They’d outran an amorphous heap of sand.

“Eat my stony balls, ya gritty asshole!” They threw the gray-blazing stone.

The witcher’s stony ball blasted bullet-like through the gritty asshole in an explosion of sand.

Nefre’s hand went for a third stone, but the exploded elemental didn’t pull itself back together. There was no sound in the courtyard but the witcher’s rapid breath. They had, apparently, knocked out all the consciousness holding those grains together.

Nefre straightened, cracking their ass-helmed neck from side to side. Inside, they were frowning.

They could deal with a single monster, as they’d so recently proven, but if that sandman had allied with any of the beings undoubtedly still skulking around the manor, that fight would’ve ended with them getting poofed into the afterlife. And Osiris was not part of the pantheon they were on good terms with.

“Fuck.”

Nefre was gonna need a party.


End file.
